domain:mgautreau.substack.com
Thoroughlygruntled
5d ago
Rogan can be very influential if he chooses to be. I could see him hosting an informal Republican primary debate on his podcast that tips the scales.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
The population of Anglo-Saxon England forbidden from carrying weapons was around 10%. ‘Not at the very bottom’ seems to have been the rule of thumb for lots of Germanic societies.
I don’t know exactly what ‘respectable citizen’ meant under Austrian law at the time, but it probably excluded more along the lines of the bottom third than the bottom two-thirds; even today former Hapsburg lands are unusual in Europe for their relatively liberal policies on concealed carry licenses.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
5d ago
Well off people who don’t have any real relations to the lower and middle classes believe prices don’t matter.
Price is how the majority of decisions are made.
And then we go blow 120$ at the bar.
Human condition and all that.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
In D&D a hand axe is an axe designed for one-handed use.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
The Republican party is also benefiting tremendously from its pro-Israël stance- they get Jewish voters to take a step away from the dems, thé ‘antisemitism crackdowns’ only target lefties, etc.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
5d ago
If the term "white" is too contentious, we can start saying "ethnic Europeans" instead. That would probably be for the best. It's less ambiguous. (Romani are a mixture of European and non-European ancestry.)
Frequently when people try to frame Romani or MENA rapists as "white", the political angle is that they want to deprive European peoples of the language for distinguishing between themselves and ethnic outsiders (even though wokes have no trouble distinguishing between white and non-white people in contexts where it's more beneficial for them to do so). But these are attacks being perpetrated against Europeans by ethnic outsiders, and Europeans have a right, arguably a duty, to frame their self-understanding in this fashion.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5d ago
I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.
Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.
I think the deeper issue is that while you're correct that someone refusing to accept any possible evidence that contradicts their position isn't approaching the topic rationally, it's not unreasonable to consider sources like the BBC and the UK police largely discredited when it comes to issues like these. That people might therefore hold practically unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of this incident is more a reflection of lack of trust in the establishment than people desperately clinging to their priors.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Do you know if it is legal for someone to walk around with a Leatherman in the UK or is that a concealed weapon?
roystgnr
5d ago
This link blurs the distinction between "tertiary source" and "game of telephone", but while https://digpodcast.org/2020/09/13/male-witches/ agrees that, for witchcraft accusations in total, 20-25% were men, it claims there was a huge variation from period to period (as in @Corvos' reply's suggestion) and especially from place to place, going up as far as 75-80% men in Russia and 90% men in Iceland.
It seems that there is a bigger story here. This person was possibly groomed by a group called O9A/764, which is a satanic accelerationism/terrorist group that recruits kids into doing things like this.
This sounds like crazy talk to me, but I was surprised that this is a relatively well known thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_crimes_involving_the_Order_of_Nine_Angles
https://x.com/klonnypin_gosch/status/1960770843614560527
There’s a broader story here that maybe deserves its own discussion: a lot of the things which the “le heckin science” types dismissed as stupid seem to be real actually? Like this seems as if the 1980s satanic panic stuff was just…true.
I think it’s wrong to try and fit this into left or right. These people aren’t really on the binary. It’s just anti society in general. You see elements of this on both the left, wanting to end society so they can build their glorious gay space communism society finally, and on the right, so they can build their glorious ethnostate.
I’ve seen both rightists and leftists trying to claim this guy for their outgroup, but I think it’s way more complex than that. Basically there is a third group which is the outgroup of everyone on purpose.
Turniper
5d ago
Nope, those are legal now too. Just can't take em into bars, schools, or government buildings. They were illegal pre 5.5 inch knife ban reversal though.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
5d ago
What else is there to even say at this point?
Looks like the shooter went out of his way to piss off as many people as possible and make it hard to pin down his political orientation. Non-negligible chance of a psyop.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I would imagine that would depend very much on the combatants, right? There's a lot of combinations of guys where I'd bet on A with a shovel over B with a broadsword.
I'm more getting at the fact that at many points in history, a peasant who walked about with a real weapon of war was liable to punishment under local custom and law.
sodiummuffin
5d ago
My understanding is that Romani have substantial Indian/Punjabi ancestry, and a quick search finds this study supporting that. Not that this is terribly relevant to how visually identifiable they are, which can be determined more directly by those more familiar with their appearance.
According to the Not the Bee, the shooter had also emblazoned "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" on their firearm.
With respect, the fuck is this? People believing themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus or fucking married to Professor Snape on the astral plane do not mean that any of those things are real. The systematic, extended, and horrific abuse of young women and girls in Great Britain by aliens, which was explicitly and deliberately covered up and minimized by the government and media, was a real thing that happened to real people, in spite of people claiming it didn't happen. Conversely, no one in Europe had social or sexual relations with Lucifer the Archenemy, uses hexes to spoil crops or kill livestock, spied on their neighbors through the eyes of a familiar spirit, or flew through the air on a broomstick.
Hang on. You're pattern matching something I've said, into something I did not.
My point was:
- There were a non-zero number of "witches", including people who self-identified as such.
- Such people obviously did not fuck Lucifer or ride brooms in the sky, unless they picked the wrong mushrooms.
- Far too many people were accused, of being witches, than there ever were "actual" witches
- This lead to many women who hadn't done anything objectionable cowering in fear. And to the Inquisitors and gullible peasants imagining witches behind every bump in the night and stillborn calf.
The UK has/had rape gangs. I have specifically alluded to the fact that I'm aware of this. I have explained that such rape gangs are thin on the ground in Dundee and similar cities in Scotland, and there is little reason to imagine their involvement in this scenario beyond rampant pattern matching.
On the Right, there is far more popular demand for Scottish rape gangs run by migrants than there are, in fact, actual migrant rape gangs. Specifically in the less urbanized parts of Scotland. I took great pains to make the limits of my knowledge, and that of my ignorance, very clear.
In fact, I have responded to the previous incident in Dundee:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/359937?context=8#context
The police proactively tracked down the gang. There was, as far as I can ascertain, no period where citizens had to take to the streets, where whistleblowers went hoarse, while the coppers tried to suppress the magnitude of the case. That is the polar opposite of a cover-up! As far as I can see, that is a reason to trust the police there more than you would by default, for British cops.
That is a rather important thing to keep in mind. Which way, Western Man? Trust the Dundee constabulary more for cracking down on a minor sex trafficking ring, or despise and distrust them because of something that happened on the other end of the country? It is, at the very least, exceedingly poor form to use their success to condemn what they say later.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I didn't refer to nobles, only to the peasantry and underclass and to class more broadly. While you start by rejecting my point, you then outline exactly what I'm talking about: Only the free, not the enslaved or serf populations; only "respectable" citizens, not the underclass. We can debate how we would sort the participants in this particular dispute into historical categories for the purpose of examining it in a hypothetical Roman or Medieval or Tokugawa legal context.
What I think we agree on is that the statement I was responding to
The open carrying of weapons has been the norm across the world for 99% of human history. It only became banned when modern high capacity states gained the capacity to suppress vigilantism.
Fails to take into account class as context. It was nearly always the norm for someone to be allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, an upper class that can variously be called citizens, nobles, knights, respectable, bourgeois, free men, as the case may be. It was nearly always the case that there also existed classes of people who were not allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, and who could be punished by the law or directly by their betters for doing so, whether we call them slaves or serfs or peasants or untouchables or the poor or foreigners or children or what have you.
It's not the case that one can say simply or easily that everyone carried weapons all the time and it was no problem before the rise of the modern state.
Hell, even in America, even in the wild west, the shootout at the OK Corral starts because there's a rule in Tombstone that you couldn't carry guns within city limits, and Wyatt Earp was on his way to enforce that law.
I am having trouble reconstructing this scenario mentally.
- the camera man pervs on her sister
- the older sister decided that the situation is serious enough for armed self-defense
- the older sister goes away, leaving her sister alone with the perv (???) for whatever time it would take to retrieve the dual wielding setup and come back (their house, or anyone's, does not appear to be within arm's reach
- the younger sister is apparently prevented from leaving at that time, because otherwise if the older sister could leave, so could she
- the area does not appear deserted but no one stops the cameraman from physically preventing the younger sister from leaving
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
I heard about this on the news, but the only angle I got was "we gotta stop this by taking away the guns". No mention that the shooter was trans, though that indeed appears to be true.
AnonymousActuary
5d ago
Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25
I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.
I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.
Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The modern-day equivalent would probably be those guys who carry a Leatherman around in a belt clip. It's not the kind of thing that would draw much attention at all, and if it did even the most anti-gun person would probably assume that the guy was an outdoorsman or often made a bunch of minor repairs, not that he was open-carrying a weapon.
The difference between smh and the telegram chuds he scoffs at is that the misinformation printed on those telegram channels is written by someone who actually believes it....
Putting aside how significant that difference is, am I to grant more latitude to flat earther propaganda because they hold actual beliefs when journalists, you say, do not?
The information environment sucks. Traditional and nu-media, professionals and amateurs, they all contribute to the state of it. I don't care for the meme right's slop factory products or The Guardian's. All I can do is complain about it, so I have and will continue to.
They will omit details, use careful wording ("no evidence to substantiate claims") and construct a story that serves their interests first and foremost.
I'm not comparing chuds to journalists, saying one is more honest than the other, or judging that one has better epistemics as a category. I don't particularly trust journalists. Scott's assessment is correct, but he is too kind to internalize the more severe implications of a "not touching you" grade of truth in reporting. I am not inclined to tolerate wishful bullshit of others because of journalism's failures. I'll add that 'telegram chuds' isn't charitable a complete description. It's a variety of online right wing subcultures that are chomping at the bit to slurp down the outrage.
My suggestion is to build a gallows. Whoever can be scapegoated as the highest possible government official who failed with knowledge of grooming gangs at the time has to go. Yes, retroactively. They probably can't re-sentence the perps, so they need to make a big show of another newly convicted Asian guy. Sucks for him, but the people bay for blood.
Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?
I share an impulse to scrutinize authority. Not all scrutiny is good, pro-social, or justified.
But it would be nice if the people who brag about epistemic humility actually employed it.
I am not entrenched in some position. I thought I was pretty clearly arguing that we don't know shit, so you shouldn't have that opinion with certainty, because it is not founded. I gave my opinion on what it looks like to me with the limited information we have. I am more than happy to vacate my position of ignorance for a better informed one. I'm probably not going to get that information from the outrage factory.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
It’s perfectly reasonable to film preteens in public if they’re acting like assholes, or if you get into a confrontation with them and they attempt to accuse you of trying to molest them.
RenOS
something is wrong
5d ago
Interesting. Probably it's my academic background, which is already very female-biased and pretty much requires one to be comfortable with travelling, including outright living in other countries. It seems I don't really register 64% women as an imbalance (even though it obviously logically is), since that's in line with my daily experiences (arguably, it's on the low end; When I started my degree, we were around 10 guys for 30 women, which after the first-year crash of nearly 50% reduced to around 4 guys for a little less than 20 women. Even now, I work almost exclusively in collaborations with women [which is intentional, since it opens up a lot of funding for me indirectly that I otherwise do not have access to]).
I guess it makes sense in that if I think back to my hometown, it wasn't very uncommon for older men to consider travelling a frivolous waste of money, while the older women seemed more accepting of the idea (though they still didn't travel without their husbands). Norms change, and the same kind of men still considers it a waste of money, but the women then just go travel anyway, I suppose?
It doesn't really fit with the school friends I kept in touch with, but those unsurprisingly were also pre-filtered for more open-minded personalities.
I followed all the rest of your logic, but: even in the UK, is it really so hard to get your hands on a chef's knife and a hatchet? My ten-year-old carries equally deadly knives (much more carefully) whenever she unloads the dishwasher, and in a pinch I bet she could find our camping equipment bag if she wanted variety.
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